Mental Health Mondays: ADELE and Amy Poehler on a Health Body Image

I don’t usually look to Grammy-award-winning artists and comedians for advice on dealing with body image issues, but last night two such women’s words just came to me. The first was British musical artist, Adele. My husband and I watched her interview with Anderson Cooper on Sixty Minutes. The whole interview was fun, but this part really caught my attention:

“The first thing to do is be happy with yourself and appreciate your body—only then should you try to change things about yourself.”

She also told Cooper that she

“rarely thinks about her body image and feels no pressure to be a “skinny-mini” or wear revealing, hyper-sexual clothing.”

What a healthy message she’s sending to all of us women in this world that is so obsessed with thinness.

And then I discovered that Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live) gives advice on a website called Smart Girls at the Party . She has some great advice for those of us struggling with body image:

“Have some gratitude…. Thank the parts of your body you were given—good eyesight, thick hair, good teeth—and don’t focus on the parts of your body that will never change…. There are only like five perfectly symmetrical people in the world, and they’re all movie stars, and they should be, because their faces are very pleasing to look at. But the rest of us are just a jangle of stuff. The earlier you learn to focus on what you do have and not on what you don’t have, the happier you will be.”

Amy Poehler

Maybe this is obvious to some of you, but it was a fresh approach for me. And today, I’m going to try to begin to act on her words.

It’s a nice change listening to two successful entertainers share these simple but profound reflections on a subject that so many women (myself included) obsess over for much of our lives. I’d love to hear your thoughts.